After two months of development, Linus Torvalds released Linux kernel version 5.5 . Among the most notable changes in this version are the ability to assign alternative names to network interfaces, the integration of cryptographic functions from the Zinc library, the ability to duplicate more than two disks in Btrfs RAID 1, a mechanism to monitor the status of live patches, the kunit drive testing framework, improved performance of the mac80211 wireless stack, the ability to access the root partition via the SMB protocol, and much more.
The new version adopted 15505 developer patches, with a patch size of 44 MB (changes affected 11781 files, adding 609208 lines of code and removing 292520 lines). Approximately 44% of all changes in version 5.5 are related to device drivers, roughly 18% to updates to hardware architecture-specific code, 12% to the network stack, 4% to file systems, and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.
Main novelties of the Linux Kernel 5.5
In this new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5, support for the xxhash64, blake2b, and sha256 checksums was added for the Btrfs file system .
In RAID1 implementation , it is possible to duplicate data across three (raid1c3) or four (raid1c4) devices (previously duplication was limited to two devices), allowing data to be saved while losing 2 or 3 devices at the same time.
Whereas Ext4 provides the ability to use smaller blocks for encryption (previously, encryption was done only by blocks whose size matched the size of the memory pages (4096)).
F2FS implements a file pinning mode with alignment along the 2MB edge for placement in a completely correct segment, ensuring the absence of further redistribution of this file by the garbage collector.
Another important new feature is the added support for monitoring the status of NVMe device temperature sensors using the hwmon API (compatible with libsensors and the "sensors" command), which does not require elevated privileges to access (previously, temperature information was reflected in the "smart log", which was available only to root).
In addition, as part of the main WireGuard VPN integration project , many features from Zinc's cryptographic library were ported to the standard Crypto API, including fast implementations of the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms.
The x86 architecture KVM hypervisor provides the ability to process nested tables of five levels of memory pages and adds support for XSAVES instructions for AMD processors. For ARM64 processors, the ability to transmit timing information was added.
Support for the blake2b hash function has also been added to the cryptographic subsystem, providing very high hash calculation performance while maintaining reliability at the SHA-3 level, as well as a shortened version of Blake2s.
Another significant change in this new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 is the new mechanism for assigning alternative names to network interfaces, which allows multiple names to be used simultaneously for an interface (including the use of multiple udev templates).
The name size can be up to 128 characters (previously the network interface name was limited to 16 characters).
To append an additional name, use the command " ip link prop add " (for example, " ip link prop add enx00e04c361e4c altname someothername "). The implementation is based on appending additional properties to the interface and can be expanded in the future with other parameters, not limited to alternative names.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the complete list of changes included in this new version of the Linux Kernel, you can consult it at the following link.
Regarding the availability of the new version, you can download the code to compile the Kernel from its official website or wait for the compiled packages to be included in the repositories of your distribution.